Regarding unlikable Millenial narrators, I couldn't get through the TV show Girls. As a white woman born in 1983, I'm a little too young to "not get it" but I guess I'm too old to connect with it. I find the exploration of the lives of all education, no substance youngsters to be boring at best. There's a portion of a generation filled with people like that, but like you said: who cares? Go live some life then get back to me.
I had been thinking of buying "Trick Mirror" and then read Oyler's review in the LRB... oy. I had to go on Facebook to get a friend to reassure me that Tolentino was actually worth reading, because the review made the book sound like more than I could handle. But that was Oyler's pretentiousness more than Tolentino's.
When I did read "Trick Mirror" my reaction was more or less the same as to Freddie's "Women Do Not Need Lunatic Overconfidence". It seemed to me that Tolentino was trying to put her finger on a serious problem, of which her essays themselves were nevertheless an example. Partly because of the internet and partly because of our growing ability to think abstractly about society and our place in it, people nowadays--women especially, and young people especially--are so consumed by pathological self-consciousness that they can't think or do anything "straight". And it's poisoning our lives.
Tolentino's essay on her barre classes (I don't even know exactly what those are) illustrates this very well. She asks herself whether the social expectation for women to stay in shape reinforces a constricting norm of femininity. Then she reminds herself that being able to afford the classes is a form of privilege many women don't share. Then she observes, very shrewdly, that the burden of self-consciousness has a gender bias: men nowadays can guilt-trip themselves in all sorts of ways, but women do it too and then have to ask "Does doing X make me a bad feminist?" on top.
The entire collection of essays feels as if it's groping towards a solution to the problem of excess self-awareness, but the paradox is that *reading and writing essays like Tolentino's* is itself a manifestation of the problem. People didn't use to think about these issues as much as we do now, and in some ways they were better off.
This essay could use an editor too, it reads like an early draft. First Oyler is portrayed as untalented, then in the second part of the piece she is suddenly an example of "genuinely talented" author who wrote a "tantalizing" book. The review of Oyler's review of Trick Mirror is the heart of the problem. It's a huge distraction dropped right in the middle of the piece -- it presents Oyler as an essentially worthless writer and makes the piece seem like it's just going to be another internet hit job. It fatally pulls the reader away from the two themes the author seems to care most about, how new young women authors are processed in contemporary literary culture, and how we protect ourselves from the toxic combination or loneliness and narcissism created by internet culture (or something -- the discussion at the end is the most interesting part of the piece and would have been a great center for the review, but is incompletely developed).
I'm glad you ended with Didion. When I finished Fake Accounts, I was trying to put my finger on why I found the novel's solipsism so unbearable while I so enjoy Didion, who is often accused of solipsism. Where I landed is that Didion uses her experiences and observations as an entry point to a world that feels very large, full of possibility, every detail and supporting character with its own story and meaning. The world of Fake Accounts is unbearably small, no thing or person having any meaning beyond what the narrator tells you in two paragraphs of musing. I've never had a book make me feel claustrophobic before.
I loved this. First, dear God, that review of JT is incomprehensible. I tried to read the whole thing, but it was so hard to follow that I just quit.
Amazing review of the novel as well. I hate that the internet has taught writers our age--especially women--to be ironic and self-deprecating all the time. The whole "Look at me, I suck but I'm super self-aware which makes it cool." is everywhere.
I do it all the time (on Twitter, mainly) -- partly because it comes so easily after years of reading it everywhere, and also because it's a way to cope with insecurity that gets you a bunch of "likes." It's hard to be "clever" without falling back on this habit. But I'd like to work on it.
Anyway, I'd be up for more book reviews (fiction, non-fiction, whatever). This was great.
Regarding the quote about "Harriet the Spy", I think Oyler completely missed the point. The lesson she drew from the book is a very narrow, literal-minded one. Harriet got in trouble for writing down exactly what she thought and then mistakenly leaving the notebook where someone else could read it, so Oyler thinks the lesson is, don't write down your real thoughts, or at least, don't leave them where anyone else could read them. That's a very shallow reading. The real point of "Harriet the Spy" is not to be a self-absorbed twit with no empathy for, or real understanding of, other people. The problem is not simply that she wrote down her real thoughts, but that her real thoughts were uncharitable, frequently nasty, and displayed a rather childish (if understandable for her age) obsession with her own cleverness. Given what Freddie says about "Fake Accounts" and the Tolento review, it sounds like the real lesson of "Harriet the Spy" is one that Oyler would benefit from learning, but she seems not to suspect its existence.
I like Tolentino and Oyler and I'll usually read what they write for the same reason I read deBoer: there's a chance they're going to say something really insightful that I haven't heard before. But the criticisms here are totally on point. Trick Mirror felt paint-by-numbers, the essay-collection equivalent of a Hollywood genre movie made by committees and focus groups. And Oyler's essay had me wandering in darkness between moments of real clarity.
Hard to avoid with essays, but both seem too inside their own heads. I'd like to see more millennial writers take what is happening inside their head and transform it into art that takes place in the real world with characters that aren't just them and their own social circle. Probably applies beyond just millennial writers too
I read Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This right before I read Fake Accounts and it was an interesting pairing. I enjoyed both in their way but at age 50 I don’t feel generationally implicated by them. This review highlighted for me that there was more emotional depth in the Lockwood book, probably because the second half is dealing with the birth and short life of a child with a rare disorder. There is a point in Fake Accounts where the protagonist is also caring for a very young child but there is no suggestion that doing so makes her feel much of anything. I did end up researching who Lauren Oyler was and what she had written after I finished the novel and so I came upon the review of Trick Mirror as well as her takedown of Sally Rooney. Jia Tolentino leaves me cold but Sally Rooney writes sentences that exactly capture what it feels like to be a young woman. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this book. They made me think and they made me feel grateful to have spent my thirties raising children instead of being online and self aware. The best part of parenting for me was how it kept me from thinking so much about my own wants — that was fun for 29 years but it was getting old. I hope that my Gen Z children will not opt for the Millennial endless noncommitment because I would rather have a grandchild than a child with a lot of Twitter followers.
Regarding unlikable Millenial narrators, I couldn't get through the TV show Girls. As a white woman born in 1983, I'm a little too young to "not get it" but I guess I'm too old to connect with it. I find the exploration of the lives of all education, no substance youngsters to be boring at best. There's a portion of a generation filled with people like that, but like you said: who cares? Go live some life then get back to me.
I had been thinking of buying "Trick Mirror" and then read Oyler's review in the LRB... oy. I had to go on Facebook to get a friend to reassure me that Tolentino was actually worth reading, because the review made the book sound like more than I could handle. But that was Oyler's pretentiousness more than Tolentino's.
When I did read "Trick Mirror" my reaction was more or less the same as to Freddie's "Women Do Not Need Lunatic Overconfidence". It seemed to me that Tolentino was trying to put her finger on a serious problem, of which her essays themselves were nevertheless an example. Partly because of the internet and partly because of our growing ability to think abstractly about society and our place in it, people nowadays--women especially, and young people especially--are so consumed by pathological self-consciousness that they can't think or do anything "straight". And it's poisoning our lives.
Tolentino's essay on her barre classes (I don't even know exactly what those are) illustrates this very well. She asks herself whether the social expectation for women to stay in shape reinforces a constricting norm of femininity. Then she reminds herself that being able to afford the classes is a form of privilege many women don't share. Then she observes, very shrewdly, that the burden of self-consciousness has a gender bias: men nowadays can guilt-trip themselves in all sorts of ways, but women do it too and then have to ask "Does doing X make me a bad feminist?" on top.
The entire collection of essays feels as if it's groping towards a solution to the problem of excess self-awareness, but the paradox is that *reading and writing essays like Tolentino's* is itself a manifestation of the problem. People didn't use to think about these issues as much as we do now, and in some ways they were better off.
This essay could use an editor too, it reads like an early draft. First Oyler is portrayed as untalented, then in the second part of the piece she is suddenly an example of "genuinely talented" author who wrote a "tantalizing" book. The review of Oyler's review of Trick Mirror is the heart of the problem. It's a huge distraction dropped right in the middle of the piece -- it presents Oyler as an essentially worthless writer and makes the piece seem like it's just going to be another internet hit job. It fatally pulls the reader away from the two themes the author seems to care most about, how new young women authors are processed in contemporary literary culture, and how we protect ourselves from the toxic combination or loneliness and narcissism created by internet culture (or something -- the discussion at the end is the most interesting part of the piece and would have been a great center for the review, but is incompletely developed).
'There's nothing in the Millennial experience worth writing about' is a bold statement but I don't think you develop it to its potential here.
I'm glad you ended with Didion. When I finished Fake Accounts, I was trying to put my finger on why I found the novel's solipsism so unbearable while I so enjoy Didion, who is often accused of solipsism. Where I landed is that Didion uses her experiences and observations as an entry point to a world that feels very large, full of possibility, every detail and supporting character with its own story and meaning. The world of Fake Accounts is unbearably small, no thing or person having any meaning beyond what the narrator tells you in two paragraphs of musing. I've never had a book make me feel claustrophobic before.
> Harriet’s mistake was a mistake; Oyler’s narrator’s is ultimately a self-defensive gesture
That seems like a bit of a stretch, unless you're counting self-aggrandising gestures as a kind of preemptive self-defense
I loved this. First, dear God, that review of JT is incomprehensible. I tried to read the whole thing, but it was so hard to follow that I just quit.
Amazing review of the novel as well. I hate that the internet has taught writers our age--especially women--to be ironic and self-deprecating all the time. The whole "Look at me, I suck but I'm super self-aware which makes it cool." is everywhere.
I do it all the time (on Twitter, mainly) -- partly because it comes so easily after years of reading it everywhere, and also because it's a way to cope with insecurity that gets you a bunch of "likes." It's hard to be "clever" without falling back on this habit. But I'd like to work on it.
Anyway, I'd be up for more book reviews (fiction, non-fiction, whatever). This was great.
Regarding the quote about "Harriet the Spy", I think Oyler completely missed the point. The lesson she drew from the book is a very narrow, literal-minded one. Harriet got in trouble for writing down exactly what she thought and then mistakenly leaving the notebook where someone else could read it, so Oyler thinks the lesson is, don't write down your real thoughts, or at least, don't leave them where anyone else could read them. That's a very shallow reading. The real point of "Harriet the Spy" is not to be a self-absorbed twit with no empathy for, or real understanding of, other people. The problem is not simply that she wrote down her real thoughts, but that her real thoughts were uncharitable, frequently nasty, and displayed a rather childish (if understandable for her age) obsession with her own cleverness. Given what Freddie says about "Fake Accounts" and the Tolento review, it sounds like the real lesson of "Harriet the Spy" is one that Oyler would benefit from learning, but she seems not to suspect its existence.
I never heard of anyone mentioned in this piece except Joan Didion.
I like Tolentino and Oyler and I'll usually read what they write for the same reason I read deBoer: there's a chance they're going to say something really insightful that I haven't heard before. But the criticisms here are totally on point. Trick Mirror felt paint-by-numbers, the essay-collection equivalent of a Hollywood genre movie made by committees and focus groups. And Oyler's essay had me wandering in darkness between moments of real clarity.
Hard to avoid with essays, but both seem too inside their own heads. I'd like to see more millennial writers take what is happening inside their head and transform it into art that takes place in the real world with characters that aren't just them and their own social circle. Probably applies beyond just millennial writers too
I read Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This right before I read Fake Accounts and it was an interesting pairing. I enjoyed both in their way but at age 50 I don’t feel generationally implicated by them. This review highlighted for me that there was more emotional depth in the Lockwood book, probably because the second half is dealing with the birth and short life of a child with a rare disorder. There is a point in Fake Accounts where the protagonist is also caring for a very young child but there is no suggestion that doing so makes her feel much of anything. I did end up researching who Lauren Oyler was and what she had written after I finished the novel and so I came upon the review of Trick Mirror as well as her takedown of Sally Rooney. Jia Tolentino leaves me cold but Sally Rooney writes sentences that exactly capture what it feels like to be a young woman. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this book. They made me think and they made me feel grateful to have spent my thirties raising children instead of being online and self aware. The best part of parenting for me was how it kept me from thinking so much about my own wants — that was fun for 29 years but it was getting old. I hope that my Gen Z children will not opt for the Millennial endless noncommitment because I would rather have a grandchild than a child with a lot of Twitter followers.
I truly laughed aloud.